Style documentation from FOSI

[ptc-5681790]

Does anyone have any thoughts about generating style specifications from an existing FOSI? We have original specifications for our FOSI but they were not maintained as the FOSI was modified, so it would be nice to be able to auto generate a spec doc from what actually exists. A fosi for fosi perhaps.


Steve

[ClayHelberg]

Hi Steve-

I'm sure such a thing would be possible, but I don't know a) whether anyone has actually done it, or b) whether it would be as useful as an actual authored style spec, which would normally include some rationale for style choices as well as descriptions, and probably would be organized differently. Though, as you point out, an awkwardly-organized spec that's up-to-date might be more useful than a hand-crafted document that's out of date.

--Clay

[DavidS.Taylor]

Hello Steve,

Given that a FOSI is essentially just a SGML/XML document, it should be possible to write an XSLT transform to re-organize the tag/attribute names and values into a list of styles and their characteristics. Unless the FOSI has been annotated with comments describing the changes over its lifetime, you'd have to add the descriptions/rationales you know about to the list manually.

It's an interesting project idea...

David

David S. Taylor

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[ptc-5681790]

David,

I've played around with just that. If the FOSI was just e-i-cs it would be trivial. The difficulty I've had is with charsubsets which can include other charsubsets and the inherit attributes. I'm to the point where I wonder if the effort of writing the stylesheet is more than the effort of a manual effort for what I need. The break-even point is probably more than one FOSI. It would be a great thing to productize if someone wanted to do it.

Steve

[JeffStevenson]

I attempted to create something like this a while back while trying to upgrade a customer's existing FOSI stylesheet. The customer's standards were conflicting depending on who was answering the questions so we thought we could "data mine" the FOSI for what was live style.

I didn't end getting to spend more than a week on it, but I was having some success. I began by just using XSLT. Had I continued, I probably would have incorporated some Java to account to multiple FOSIs and any other nuances where XSLT may fall short.

It is certainly possible, but I'm unsure how useful it would be for day-to-day operations. Would be more useful when doing a migration or an upgrade.